The Cure for Death by Lightning (14 page)

My mother removed her apron, which had become filthy in the struggle, and threw it to the floor of the barn. “I’m going inside,” she said.

I watched her walk down the alleyway of the barn and disappear into darkness. A little while later, a light flared up in the yard as my mother broke the blackout and lit a lamp in front of the kitchen window. The hazy light of the lamp moved through the parlor and went dead as my mother closed her bedroom door. Over the dark house, the Milky Way stretched out forever.

“She can’t take it.” My father grinned at me. “We can do it by ourselves, then.”

He whistled and worked with agonizing slowness. His hand, his wrist, his elbow, disappeared into the cavity of the cow. She moaned and struggled now and again, then the bawling became less frequent. I looked for Lucifer in the rafters. My father began swearing. The ovaries were not where he had imagined, and he searched inside her body
until his arm was bloody to the shoulder. He rinsed his hands off in the bowl of water again and again. The cow’s head rested heavily on the stanchion and her eyes rolled in her head; she’d bit her tongue and the blood congealed on her nostril. I held the lantern up until my arm grew numb and tingling, then switched hands. A cat, one of the unnamed, slunk up to the bloody dish, sniffed it, and slunk off into the shadows. Lucifer appeared and wrapped himself around my leg and that was a comfort, but when I gave him no attention, he trotted over to a pile of loose hay and curled himself up there. As the night stretched on, the nausea of sleeplessness came over me in waves. I dreamed on my feet and when I jerked awake the barn seemed filled with the tinkling of bells. My father rinsed his knife in the bowl of water and its blade clanked against the side of the dish.

“Higher!” my father said. I switched hands and held up the lantern. I was cold, but the sweat dripped from my father’s face. “Damn it!” he said. The old white tom, ears bitten down to nothing, crept up to Lucifer asleep in the hay and tried to do his dirty humping business on the black cat, but Lucifer squirmed away and hissed at the old tom, and the tom danced off. My sense of time dissolved. My arms grew numb, and I switched hands again and again. I dreamed.

“There!” my father said. “There!”

He pulled something from the body of the cow and dropped it in the bloody dish. “Now,” he said.

He went to the other side of the cow and made a second incision just in front of the hipbone. The cow struggled for a moment, but she gave up quickly. She didn’t bawl this time. My father’s search here went more smoothly. He found the second ovary and slopped it into the dish. He stretched his back and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. Then he took the two ovaries from the bowl and held them out for me to look at. The ovaries were oblong and purplish red, like the egg plums that grew in my mother’s orchard.

“You have these,” he said. “This is what makes you female.”

I looked at the bloody things, not comprehending what he was trying to tell me. He laughed and threaded the curved needle with linen thread and sewed the hide of the cow together. The sound and texture of the needle going in made my teeth ache. He worked, now, without swearing. His face grew red from the strength of his concentration. But
the cow was sinking. She didn’t have the strength to stand on her own, and it was the support of the stanchion and post she was tied to that kept her up. What sky I could see out the barn door was growing pink. The rooster crowed and was answered by a rooster far up the valley. Cats fighting, or mating, screeched someplace behind the barn. The homesteader’s children clanked rocks in their graves. A black lizard slid across the floor.

My father untied the binds that held Gertrude as I released her head from the stanchion. The cow slumped to the ground. As he bent down to arrange her legs to relieve the pressure of her guts on the incisions, and to pour disinfectant on the wounds, I slipped from the barn and ran to the house. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table, writing on one of the pages of her scrapbook, mumbling to my dead grandmother. Her eyes were puffy, her face was creased where she’d lain on her pillow. She closed the scrapbook as I closed the kitchen door.

“Go catch a little sleep,” she said. “I’ll wake you for school.”

She pushed stray hairs away from my eyes and tucked my hair behind my ears. I pulled my head away.

M
Y MOTHER
woke me with a butterfly kiss. She grazed her eyelashes across my cheek, fluttering them, and entered my dream as a moth. I shook my head awake, and my mother stood straight and produced a butterfly from behind her back. It was made from petals of scarlet flax and my mother’s fingers breathed life into it. This was a child’s game; it made me angry. I threw back the covers and turned my back on her as I dressed for school in a blue pinafore over a white blouse. I ate breakfast in silence and walked out of that kitchen and down Blood Road without saying so long to anyone, triumphant in my crankiness, knowing full well that my mother’s sorry eyes were following me.

Lucifer tried to follow me too, mewing, onto Blood Road. A black cat on a red road, he was a sight. But I had no time for him that morning. I threw rocks, harder than I needed to, and he trotted back to the farm.

Halfway to school the anger lessened, and in an act of appeasement for hurting my mother I picked up a turtle straining her way back across the road and set her at the edge of one of the many sloughs. As I did, several turtles splashed from logs into the swamp. The red and yellow of their painted shells reflected like cats’ eyes. I watched the turtle I had helped ease into the water become a graceful and swiftmoving thing.

The sky was stormy and threatening to rain again. The low clouds
and the effects of the sleepless night made me feel heavy, made the day seem out of my control. Just before Boulee’s Farm I heard footsteps behind me — I know I heard them — but when I turned no one was there. I ran the rest of the way to school, hugging my lightning arm.

The small one-room school building, with its wood heater in the middle, had cloak hooks at the back. The walls were bare wood except for the blackboard, a framed photograph of the king, and a map of the world. All the grades were jumbled together. I had sat in this same classroom with my brother until he left school to work full-time on the farm. I knew the names of all my classmates then, and I can still remember some of their names now, but I’d never been popular like Dan. I’d been heavy and shy as a younger child and was still dogged by the stigma of that early awkwardness. The only friendship I’d had my father had undone with his strange rages in this last year since the bear attacked our camp. Lily Bell, Mrs. Bell’s white-haired, whitefaced daughter, had come several times with Mrs. Bell on her visits and we’d become something like friends. Lily Bell had brought me old magazines full of movie stars and beauty secrets, and we had lain on my bed, giggling at the pictures and gossiping about other kids at school. During one visit just the summer before, the summer I was fourteen, Lily Bell brought eyeliner, and we sat at my orange-crate vanity and tried to apply it as the magazines described. My father heard us giggling, came into my room, and slapped the eyeliner from Lily’s hand, then slapped her face. Lily Bell burst into tears and ran to Mrs. Bell, who sat with my mother in the parlor. My father stomped after Lily and yelled at Mrs. Bell.

“Your sluttish daughter brought make-up into my house!”

Mrs. Bell sputtered, shamefaced, and said, “I don’t know what to say.”

But of course she had plenty to say. She said it all around town, to anyone foolish enough to listen to her. And although even my father couldn’t scare Mrs. Bell away, Lily Bell had never come to visit again.

Now, at school, when she wasn’t ignoring me, Lily Bell joined the other kids in taunting me over my father’s craziness. I sat at my desk in the far corner and ignored them all. Opposite me, at the back of the room, the desk where Sarah Kemp had sat was left empty.

During hygiene inspection, Mrs. Boulee found a yellow streak of manure on my forearm, from helping my father in the night, and my
nails were dirty. She wasn’t all that unkind, saying only I should be more careful about washing up after chores, but that singled me out for Robert Parker and his thugs. I’d been their victim before; years before I’d been forced to steal rhubarb from the abandoned Fraser property next to the school. The house was haunted and I was terrified. One of the boys jumped at me from a derelict window and I ran home, screaming, sure that Old Man Fraser had risen from the dead.

At noon Robert Parker and Lily Bell led a group of kids that surrounded me as I read on the back steps of the school. Robert Parker was a short boy who wore nothing but baggy work denims to school. He’d been trying to catch my eye all that school year, but he had a funny way of going about it. He’d smile at me one minute. Then, when the other boys were around, he’d call my father down. He tried giving me his half smile, half sneer even there, with all those kids around, but when I ignored him and went on staring at my book, he said, “Dirty Beth, never takes a bath!”

I ignored him. I ignored them all.

“Your mother’s a witch,” said Parker. “She talks to the Devil.”

“She does not,” I told the book. “That’s stupid.”

“She talks to herself anyhow,” said Parker. “I seen her.”

“She’s an Indian lover,” said Lily Bell. “Lives with Indians. Lets Indians into her house.”

Lily Bell was ridiculous in a frilly pretty-girl dress much too young for her. Nevertheless, I felt poor and clumsy in my plain white blouse and pinafore. I looked down at my rough red hands, and the book that trembled in them.

“Squaw,” Parker said. “Beth’s a squaw.”

“I am not,” I said.

“No, she’s not a squaw,” said Parker. “She’s a sheep tick.”

“Her dad’s a hoarder,” said one of the other kids. “They get fat while the rest of us starve.”

Parker shoved his hands in the pockets of his denims and rocked back on his heels. “Your father’s gone crazy,” said Parker. “Turned into a wild man. Too long in the hills, eh?”

I looked up into the faces of every one of those kids, Lily Bell and Robert Parker too. “None of you is starving,” I said. “You’re a bunch of fatheads, the lot of you.”

My lightning arm went dead on me suddenly, and the book leapt out
of my hands onto the step. I bent to pick it up and, as I did, Parker jumped on the steps behind me, clapped his hand over my mouth, and, together with a couple of other boys, picked me up and carried me, as I squirmed and kicked and tried to scream, over to the abandoned Fraser property. When I bit Parker’s hand, he took up a stick and forced it sideways into my mouth. I screamed, but the scream came out only as an indignant grunt. Once in the old house several boys held me down to the floor.

“Let’s see how dirty Beth is!” said Parker.

They stripped me of my underwear and pulled my pinafore over my head and ripped my blouse off me. They pulled off my brassiere and laughed at my nakedness. I looked off into the corner of the creaky old building. Decades’ worth of dusted cobwebs draped the ceiling like a canopy on a bed. Floorboards were missing in places, and the windows had long ago been knocked out. Parker and the other kids knelt around me, not letting me get up, pushing me. I gathered my knees up and hugged myself. Somebody started up a chant: “Slut, slut, slut!”

Lily Bell stood a little away from the group, watching without an emotion on her face, with her hands on her frilly hips. After a time she picked up my clothes, pushed the other kids out of the way, and threw my clothes at me.

“Let her up,” she said.

“She’s nothing but a slut,” said Parker.

“Leave her!” Lily said again.

I dressed quickly, sobbing, still sitting on the floor, fighting the clumsiness in my lightning arm. When they finally let me go, I ran from the old house and went on running, home.

Parker and the chorus of kids chased after me a little way down Blood Road, yelling, “Slut!” until one by one they stopped chasing me. I ran anyway, crying, following Blood Road through an ocean of alfalfa and young corn, flax and wheat, barley and oats. The clouds finally broke and the downpour began. The thing that had followed me that morning hopped up onto the road. I heard it first, scuffing behind me, and when I turned I saw its footprints, a man’s footprints, picking up the wet dirt on Blood Road and leaving dry red tracks that quickly disappeared in the rain. I ran harder until I saw Filthy Billy
sitting against a pile of hay in the alfalfa field, with his collar up against the rain. He smiled and waved, swore at me and apologized.

I shouted at him. “Billy,” I cried, “something’s following me.”

“There always is,” he yelled back.

I ran up to him, but the thing still followed, and Filthy Billy began swearing and apologizing profusely, and there was no comfort there with him. I left Billy to it and stumbled into the house. I turned to see that the footsteps ended outside, on the front steps. I ran to my room and threw myself on the bed, sat with my back against the wall, and clutched my pillow. The voices of Parker and the other kids who had stripped me filled my head, pounded on the walls. Their hands tore at my clothes. Their laughter beat down on me. Then it seemed if I were to stay very still everything would stop. I lay down and held myself rigid on the bed and closed my eyes. After some time like that, the hand on my lightning arm began to expand, spread out like a balloon, take on proportions much too big for my arm, big enough to hit back. I opened my eyes and looked down my arm and was surprised to see just an ordinary hand. I stared up at the blue forget-me-nots on the headboard of my bed and put myself there, in a stream full of them. The voices faded away and became the rain beating on the roof, the wind howling around the house.